The 'birds nest' Olympic stadium in Beijing under construction, 2008. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

China in Ten Words by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H Barr (Duckworth, £16.99)In the days of Mao, no one else would dare call himself a "leader", as every wannabe Alan Sugar now must. The dentist-turned-novelist Yu here provides a brilliant memoir of China organised around the changes in meaning of 10 key Chinese words, from his childhood during the cultural revolution witnessing brawls and executions, to finding, as an adult, a pirated copy of one of his own books on a city stall.

Throughout this beautifully narrated, carefully analytical and at times personally courageous book, Yu shows the dark side of China's economic "miracle". His final two chapters reflect modern currents in the west, too: "copycat" can mean détournement, or artistic reappropriation, but also just means knockoff smartphones, pirated books, or tasteless arrivisme. Meanwhile, the wild popularity of "bamboozle" (roughly, swindle or bullshit), to describe the activities not only of con-artists but of university lecturers or politicians, indicates to the saddened Yu that "we live in a frivolous society, one that doesn't set much store by matters of principle". I suppose we're all Chinese now.

The Stadium by Tim Abrahams (Machine Books, £8)And so to Beijing's "bird's-nest" Olympic stadium, which one engineer who worked on Munich's stadium called, with enjoyably rivalrous vitriol, an "insult to birds". Abrahams's fascinating pamphlet considers London's new Olympic stadium alongside previous efforts: the 1932 Los Angeles Coliseum, Berlin's 1936 Olympiastadion, Tokyo's 1958 "Metabolist" stadium, and so on. It turns out that the new London stadium isn't much cop, and will make "a really poor football stadium" afterwards. (It's important for English fans to be close to the pitch, without a running track in the way.)

As well as the educational architectural discussion (enhanced by Nigel Peake's line drawings), Abrahams offers a denunciation of Olympic critics. The French left critique of industrialised sport (updated recently in Marc Perelman's Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague) is rapidly dismissed, while Abrahams sees psychogeographers such as Iain Sinclair and Will Self appropriating the Situationist "dérive" without imagining a better world. Apparently a whole new generation of "miserable critics" are following in their footsteps. Can't, he more or less argues, everyone just cheer up a bit?

Vegetables: A Biography by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, £13)"Vegetables have gone through countless unexpected adventures throughout the centuries," burbles this book, "and their history is sometimes as eventful as that of humans." This is not actually true, of course, but one must allow food writers their hyperbole, as also with this book's celebration of the "erotic" or sexual potential of the carrot, the artichoke, the chili pepper, and – believe it or not – the bean. (I think that when Andrew Marvell wrote of his "vegetable love" he meant that it was growing, not that he actually fancied turnips.)

These slender essays each consider a single vegetable – "The Pea", "The Jerusalem Artichoke", "The Tomato" (which the author bravely insists is a vegetable because of "the way it is eaten") – with its provenance and etymology, its historical uses in cooking, the occasional recipe (sauerkraut), and some cultural associations. ("It's not surprising, then, that the artichoke was Sigmund Freud's favourite plant." Isn't it?) It's all undeniably flavoursome and educational, even if one is inclined to despair at the foodist-mysticism of it all. "Vegetables connect us to the earth, to that Mother Earth of whom the ancients spoke." Yes, and so do feet.